While I was otherwise engaged, Colin tidied up and organised a lot of my clutter. This meant that I could find things again – such as the plan for my novel.
I wrote this plan two years ago, apparently, on the advice of someone trying to solve the problem of how I get my characters from A to B to C; that is to fill in the gaps caused by not writing the story in sequence. The solution was to:
- go through what I’d written
- write down what happens in each chapter, which is essentially a scene currently,
- work out what needs to happen in between each chapter, i.e. fill in the gaps to get ‘the plan’
- write the plan up.
I’d done steps 1–3, and was part way through step 4 when I put the plan ‘somewhere safe’. When I came to filling in the gaps after losing the plan, I had to make it up as I went along.
The characters became wayward, doing and saying what they pleased without any regard for me and my plan. Now that I’ve found the plan again, I’m having to wrangle the characters back on track. To this aim, I’m writing a new plan called Getting Back On Track
(GBOT).
It was going really well for a week or two, but then I noticed the odd appearance of this site, and I got distracted by WordPress wrangling instead.
I will return to my characters this week.
